Bayside & Hawthorne Heights Acoustic Holiday Show Review

On December 21st, emo veterans Bayside and Hawthorne Heights‘acoustic holiday tour was brought to Baltimore, Maryland. The tour is a first for Bayside as they’ve never done any full band acoustic tour before. Hawthorne Heights opened the show and although only two of their members were able to be on the tour, they still sounded amazing. The highlight of their whole set was the ending when they closed it with a beautiful stripped down version of “Ohio Is For Lovers” and I have to admit, I did have flashbacks to my middle school scene phase.

The set Bayside played was unlike anything heard from them before, they performed songs never once played live and even performed a fitting cover of “All I Want for Christmas is You” by Mariah Carey. Once the show was drawing to a close and fans inevitably wanted more songs, Anthony Raneri, Bayside’s lead singer, joked that “it isn’t the mid-2000’s anymore” and “this is an adult show, we got shit to do in the morning”. This tour was as interesting as it was refreshing, I was one of the youngest people there, just proving that the previous generation of kids who once smeared eyeliner all over their face and lined up outside Warped Tour every summer have grown up, and Bayside and Hawthorne Heights have grown with them.